You may think mental fitness is most applicable to your personal life and personal growth, but let’s face it—our personal growth is very connected to our career growth. Mental fitness is essential for navigating professional settings and advancing your career. By learning the principles and practices of Positive Intelligence and mental fitness, you will likely notice a significant, positive shift in the outlook on your career. Here are some amazing impacts that strong mental fitness can have on your career.
Mental Fitness Cultivates Self-Fulfillment
The most common negative emotion when you’re on the job hunt, starting a new position, or up for a promotion is that nagging feeling of self-doubt. That self-doubt is really the voice of The Judge, which we all experience (some people associate this with the imposter syndrome.) With Positive Intelligence, we learn to feel more confident in ourselves and are therefore less influenced by others’ opinions; including those of our own Judge. Failures and mistakes don’t reflect who you are as a person, but rather are opportunities to learn and grow. By silencing those nagging voices of negativity in your head, you are therefore silencing external sources of validation that we directly tie to our self-worth such as promotions, awards, and other common career milestones. You’re worthy regardless of these things!! Instead, improving your mental fitness helps you feel confident, content, and satisfied in your self-worth through internal validation no matter what happens in life. Simply put, Positive Intelligence helps us see all of our innate greatness and appreciate the people we are.
Mental Fitness Helps You Take Smarter Risks
When you are measuring career risks, you may be telling yourself to play it safe in an effort to avoid embarrassment or judgment. Playing it safe sometimes means we take very few risks at all! This is the work of The Judge convincing you the status quo and all its ‘safety’ is better than the ‘unknown’ associated with said risk. We often play the ‘what if’ game to exhaustion. And when The Judge is playing host to that game, the answers often lead to taking no risk at all. When you are listening to your Sage, you can feel more confident and assured in your decision-making, even if you end up falling short of your expectations. And if you fall short of your expectations, it’s OK – you’re human! We all fall short of our goals sometimes. The best thing you can do is reflect, identify the areas you fell short, come up with ideas to minimize that from happening again, and in turn, you’ll reduce the amount of time it takes to ,emotionally recover from failures, This time will be different because you won’t be basing your self-confidence on the failure itself. You will be strong enough and able to silence those voices that try to equate your failures with your worth.
We all make mistakes and it’s a constant in life. Isn’t it interesting how forgiving we are of other people’s mistakes and yet, when it comes to practicing empathy and self-forgiveness, we suck! When you stop beating yourself up for making mistakes and rather accept it as exactly that – a mistake! – your Sage will guide you towards taking risks that are within your dis-comfort zone.
Mental Fitness Helps You Understand Others
When we let our negativity take over our perception, we may feel that others are judging us, thinking the worst of us, or out to get us. We think the worst of others, just as we think the worst of ourselves. We may choose to cast blame on others when we don’t get the job, make excuses for our actions, or avoid changing bad habits. Bottom line, we point the finger outwards, instead of at ourselves, and blame anything that might take us off the hook. These behaviors certainly won’t help you get ahead in your career. By strengthening your mental fitness, you are able to take clear-headed, focused action when approaching interpersonal conflicts, and you will find that you have more empathy for other people when using your Sage. You might also find that you’re able to better understand how to take accountability for your mistakes and move forward in a productive manner, because you know that failures don’t define who you are.
Taking Charge of Your Career
There are so many benefits of mental fitness when it comes to taking charge of your career, your relationship with risks and challenges, and your relationships with co-workers or people in your industry. When you strengthen your mental muscles, you are readily able to identify your Saboteurs and take positive action towards using your Sage. You are more likely to open yourself up to new opportunities and are less likely to be discouraged by failure. When the Sage is leading the charge, great things can happen!
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